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Kool B

  • Kool B's Wordville 1330
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    • Kool B In Voice
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Kool B

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A Plate Goes Empty

A copper spoon 

that would have been polished silver 

slips from a mouth as wide as a watermelon smile 

revealing the imagination of a negro child 

that invents in pencil, pen and crayon black 

like a score from Porgy and Bess 

held together by a language that only the outcast speaks 

bazaar like segregation on paper 

 as bleached as falling  snow 

He knows his ivory canvas Is a delight of privilege 

stained with coal and pitch 

A plate goes empty 

exposing its livid hunger 

haunting  a reflection 

 

A copper spoon 

that would have been polished silver 

scrapes against a set chicken-bone teeth 

. . .  slides from between a pair of thick paper- bag lips 

His sweeping eyes 

staring into a T. D. Rice cartoon 

A delight of privilege 

that invents in pencil, pen, and crayon black 

bazaar like segregation in heaven 

springing from the graveyards of Dixie 

where the spook of Jim Crow shades 

stained with coal and pitch 

a score from Porgy and Bess 

held together by a language that only the outcast speaks 

A plate goes empty

06/16/2021

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For Alvin LeBlanc, a.k.a. Kool B, a veteran of poetry slams going back to 1990, the South is nothing less than “a literary haven,” with Houston in particular “primed” for poetry. “People in the South talk,” says the 54-year-old LeBlanc, who grew up in Lafayette, La., and came to Houston to study sociology at Texas Southern State University. “They see you down the street, and they want to say something. Southern people are also used to listening to orators, preachers. From all of that, poetry has an ear.” 

LeBlanc, an instructor at the Adult Reading Center, brings his poetry to the people as producer of the online show Wordville and a member of the DJ collective Rebel Crew. In performance, LeBlanc recites his poetry in a way that is fluid, yet sounds unrehearsed, as if the words were being pulled out of thin air. In a performance at the Jazz Church of Houston, with his visor wrapped around his long, braided hair, the bespectacled LeBlanc moves gracefully as he speaks, illustrating each line with slow, simple gestures, like a Tai Chi master talking jazz: A village of windblown desperados in pursuit of a gold train loaded down with precious metals, pressed into bullions that grow like sunset, Texas to California dreamin’… It was the sound of black thunder and gallop that made the canyons quake. Let’s make no mistake about it: There’s no honor among thieves and siege is how the west was won. 

Though poetry has always been a tool for political protest, LeBlanc believes the art often reveals more commonalities than differences. “It brings the races together,” says LeBlanc. “Coming from rural Louisiana, where you would get chased home if you didn’t stay on your side of the city, poetry has shown me that people can work together, that people do have the same heartbreaks and the same anger. Poetry is where you can hear the humanness in people.”

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